The Curse of the Wer.. - Site de Thomas - Free

WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE WOLVES
‘Eena’ was female, the forest was presented as a familiar (rather than
alien) environment, and men, rather than wolves, were depicted as a
threat. 13 Because the story is narrated by Eena’s male lover, it stopped
short of inviting a full identification with the wolf/woman; but by
combining established ideas about the superiority of ‘pure’ nature
over a ‘corrupt’ culture, the affinity between women and nature, and
critiques of an alienated masculinity (implied by the narrator’s dismay
at Eena’s slaughter), this story was significantly different from previous
narratives about lycanthropy. Here, for the first time, was a werewolf
story that developed a critical revaluation of the woman/nature versus
man/culture oppositions that had animated tales of lycanthropy to
date. Banister’s narrative innovation has been built upon by subsequent
writers, notably Ursula Le Guin, whose ‘The Wife’s Story’ is narrated by
a she-wolf who is disgusted and disturbed at her mate’s transformation
into a human man. 14 In keeping with the feminist aim of revising the
habits of subject and identity formation stemming from the Enlightenment
(in which both femininity and nature are systematically othered),
this narrative takes the step of encouraging sympathetic identification
with the Other (in the form of a she-wolf).
By inviting a positive identification with woman/nature, Le Guin’s
story participated in a project that developed during the 1970s and
1980s, described by Alice Jardine as ‘the valorization of the feminine’
or ‘the putting into discourse of “woman”’. 15 As it was developed by a
number of writers, this project aimed to recuperate mythologies and
symbols of the feminine which had been systematically denigrated
or distorted under patriarchy, and to develop a basis for the positive
experience of feminine embodiment and spirituality. The merciless
fertility goddesses and supernatural seductresses of the nineteenthcentury
imagination, for example, were reinterpreted as the debased
descendants of a prehistoric culture in which the feminine was revered.
In reclaiming such images as sources of feminine empowerment, writers
such as Monique Wittig, Mary Daly, Susan Griffin, Merlin Stone,
Kim Chernin and Gloria Feman Orenstein found woman’s association
with nature to be a fertile source of inspiration. The ensuing literature
of ‘goddess worship’ effectively valorized and rehabilitated
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